Look down. No not that far. Look at the thing that uses your belly button as a hood ornament. If you're like me, the hood ornament hangs a little out there. Maybe it just looks like a flat decal. Or maybe you haven't seen your hood ornament in a while. In any form, that thing, your gut, is one of the smartest things on the planet.
To be honest, I always find this weird. Where along the way did we stop listening to our gut? When I think back to the time warped town I grew up in I remember teachers and authorities telling us to think more. Was it because I was in a time warped town or because I was young?
Either way I find myself reminding myself and other people to listen to our instincts. Aren't we supposed to do that naturally? What's the point of an instinct if you don't follow it? Why does it take a therapist to remind a person this is what we are supposed to do with our instincts? Maybe we've gotten a little too smart for our own good. Maybe we trust our rational brains just a little too much.
Think about it. As a whole, we are getting smarter. Technology has made leaps and bounds in the past 20 years. What the common 8th grader learns I didn't learn until I was well into high school. We communicate on multiple levels. We can multitask. All of this could serve to make us more evolved. But we've left out whole parts of us which understands without using our thinking brains. So undervalued have our guts become that people are often looked down upon to use them.
What's worse, it seems people no longer even know what it's like to listen to their gut. When I look around, people call obsessive thinking, unresolved emotions, and repressed desires (this last one can be tricky) their gut. While all of those could be part of a "gut" none make a whole gut. So here is my lame attempt to define our gut in hopes that someone tells me I'm an idiot and comes up with a better definition: our gut is the directive given to us in situations where action should be taken when our head, heart, and spirit are completely silent yet act as one.
Wow. That was lamer than I thought. Now I ask you, reader: how would you like a main character to interact with his/her gut? To trust it and always use it? To ignore it? To be oblivious? To actively go against it? I'm curious about the people you want to read about.
